Up, up and away

An interesting run this morning. A long run, nothing particularly unusual there, but this one had a twist, it was all trail running. My first challenge was trying to figure out where to do it. The difficulty was finding somewhere I could run for the better part of two hours off road. This is something I have been pondering all week. There are some great running trails up in the hills of Perth, but that is a fair drive from where I live. I could have gone to the beach or the river but that would have meant running over the same piece of ground many many times, which wasn't all that appealing. I thought about King's Park, which has a fair few trails, but instead, I thought I would try a nature reserve called Reabold Hill.

I haven't been to Reabold Hill in years. The last time I was there it was basically a large area of bush with a couple of tracks through it. It seems that was long ago, now it is a very well managed reserve with a whole network of tracks through out it. Apparently about 15kms worth. Most of the tracks are on packed limestone, but bits and pieces are sand etc. It is a great recreational area, attested to by the fact that it was fairly busy this morning.

The run was a hard one, and not a particularly fast one. The difficulty of the run was mostly due to the Hill part of Reabold Hill. The park is full of the damn things. Over the course of my run I gained and lost about 460m of elevation, which is a fair bit for one of my runs. We aren't talking long gentle inclines either.

In the end I did enjoy it though. I spent the whole time exploring. There is a main loop within the park that is about 6km long, but there are also countless other little trails. I did one lap of the main trail while I got my bearings and waited for the sun to come up. Then I did another lap, but this time running up any side trail that I came across. I set myself the goal of trying to cover every trail in the park and I think I got pretty close. The upside to doing this was that I barely had to go over the same ground twice. That kept the run interesting. It also meant that I came across some absolutely monster hills. So now I know what trails not to run up in future.

There was also an absolutely glorious sunrise, with the sun rising over a misty city. It turns out Reabold hill is a great vantage point from which to watch the sunrise. Makes me wish that I had been running with a camera.